Re: Complemetary questions about decoding a dir and about formats

On Jan 1, 2004, at 7:30 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> I do not really need wav format (by the way, is wav in some way a ms 
> invention?).

Yes, as I understand it the WAV file format (RIFF/WAVE) is a Microsoft 
bastardization of the IFF standard originally developed by Electronic 
Arts (EA IFF 1985).

> What I'm trying to do is to decode a lot of mp3s to a format usable 
> for listening with a non-mp3-capable cd player, i.e in my car, and 
> then burn them to CDs with k3b. At the first stage (before burning) I 
> would like to save the mp3s as individual output files in another 
> directory than the mp3s.
>
> 1. Is .cdr a format for my purposes?

Sure; most CD burning programs ought to be able to use the raw audio 
data written by madplay to such a file.

> 2. Shell scripts are a bit beyond my capacity for the moment (but I'm 
> learning fast). What do you mean with "The above is for Bourne-derived 
> shells; hopefully yours is not of Csh variety."?

This is definitely off-topic, but FYI --

There are two great classes of UNIX shells: the Bourne shell and its 
derivatives (e.g. ksh, bash, zsh), and the C shell and its derivatives 
(e.g. tcsh). The former class is generally more powerful; the latter 
suffers inherent weaknesses but is unfortunately a common shell for 
interactive use.

To find out which you have, you can 'echo $SHELL'. If you get back 
something that ends with csh, you'll either have to change your 
scripting style or change your shell. (Sorry, I can't help you with csh 
scripting.)

> What about this? If i navigate to the directory where the mp3s are and 
> then:
>
> for file .mp3; do madplay -o -v $file.cdr $file; done
>
> Where in this little script should I put the target directory name 
> (called
> "cdr)? What does "done" mean? Close?

Try something like this:

     for file in *.mp3; do madplay -v -o cdr/$file.cdr $file; done

"done" marks the end of the "for ... do" loop.

-- 
Rob Leslie
[email protected]